Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition Processor Review

Article Index:

Low Res Gaming: Crysis and ET: Quake Wars

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars When testing processors with these game engines, we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the game's physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

Our low-resolution Crysis and ET: Quake Wars benchmarks scale proportionately once again as expected, though the spread is a bit different, depending on which game engine you look at. In Crysis, a notoriously piggish game engine that requires both a beefy CPU and a high-end GPU to run well, the gain observed for the Core i7 975 over the Core i7 965 is less prominent at about 4%. On the other hand, Id's game engines in general are coded more efficiently and run more efficiently on a wider range of machines, with higher levels of processor cache and memory bandwidth historically offering better numbers in this type of test. Here the Core i7 975 leads the next fastest CPU by about 14%.